h Miss Carthew. She was
always ready to forgive at once, and, as Michael respected her enough to
dislike annoying her, he found it perfectly easy to apologize and be
friends--particularly as he had set his heart on Nancy's Christmas
visit.

Carlington Road and the Confederate Roads were now under the control of
Michael and his friends. Rodber had gone away to a public school: the
elder Macalister and Garrod had both got bicycles which occupied all
their time: Michael, the twin Macalisters and a boy called Norton were
in a very strong position of authority. Norton had two young brothers
and the Macalisters had one, so that there were three slaves in
perpetual attendance. It became the fashion to forsake the school field
for the more adventurous wasteland of the neighbourhood. At the end of
Carlington Road itself still existed what was practically open country
as far as it lasted. There were elm-trees and declivities and broken
hedges and the excavated hollows of deserted gravel-pits. There was an
attractive zigzag boundary fence which was sufficiently ruinous at
certain intervals to let a boy through to wander in the allotments of
railway workers. Bands of predatory 'cads' prowled about this
wasteland, and many were the fierce fights at sundown between the cads
and the Randellites. Caps were taken for scalps, and Miss Carthew was
horrified to observe nailed to Michael's bedroom wall the filthiest cap
she had ever seen.

Apart from the battles there were the luxurious camps, where cigarettes
at five a penny were smoked to the last puff and were succeeded by the
consumption of highly scented sweets to remove the traces of tobacco.
These camps were mostly pitched in the gravelly hollows, where Michael
and the Macalisters and Norton used to sit round a camp-fire on the warm
evenings of summer, while silhouetted against the blue sky above stood
the minor Macalister and the junior Nortons in ceaseless vigilance. The
bait held out to these sentries, who sometimes mutinied, was their
equipment with swords, guns, pistols, shields, bows, arrows and
breastplates. So heavily and decoratively armed and sustained by the
prospect of peppermint bull's-eyes, Dicky Macalister and the two Nortons
were content for an hour to scan the horizon for marauding cads, while
down below the older boys discussed life in all its ambiguity and
complication. These symposiums in the gravel-pit tried to solve certain
problems in a very speculative manne